Episode 4×22, “The Walking Dead.” This has gotta be it with a title like that. The wall is coming down and I don’t care how small the CW budget it, I want to see everyone who’s ever died to come back again. I mean, let’s at least beat out “Ghost World” anyway, because that episode was rocking and this needs to top that. Okay, enough said, let’s get to it.
—————————————————————————————————————————–
Cold Open
- Am I the only one who was really distracted by the fact that Elena couldn’t do fifty pull ups (and seemed to be having a tough time with the maybe ten that she did do)? I think the proper term is “counter productive blocking.”
- Anyway, I think this scene did nothing but regurgitate the exposition from the previouslies-on. Although Elena’s mention of a shower did make me remember that I don’t know what the hell happened with Bonnie’s dad. What the hell happened to Bonnie’s dad? Why even introduce him if he was going to be such a non-factor? He didn’t make up for the loss of the Carol Lockwood; he just emphasized the lack of any meaningful characters over the age of nineteen in Mystic Falls.
—————————————————————————————————————————–
Everything up until the first commercial break.
- I haven’t commented for live five minutes now, which is a testament to how good act one was (is? grammar…).
- I can respect the fact that Elena knows herself well enough to know that if she sincerely apologizes than everything else will coming welling in and she won’t be able to hold on to her vengeance quest (“respect” being a tenuous word, of course, because seriously) but can’t she at least say that she promises to have a serious conversation where they suss out everything and she makes amends once all the Katherine crap is over?
- A major player in the gang (in this case, Bonnie) once again won’t communicate major plans that will affect everybody else because no one on this show ever learns lessons from past major screw ups. Admittedly, there’s a very, very good reason this time (since Silas apparently is blessed with every super power in the world except charisma) but still…
—————————————————————————————————————————–
Everything up until the second commercial break.
- “Do you not notice all the end of the world crap going on right now?” -Damon to Elena. Someone finally had to say it, except it needed to be said to everybody for like, ten episodes now. Still, heh.
- Damon gets staked in the tummy way too many times on this show. I think that’s there to satisfy both the haters and the woobie lovers.
- Ric!!! I love and miss you! (please don’t be evil).
—————————————————————————————————————————–
Everything up until the third commercial break.
- I’m glad at least one ghost (or whatever they are, since they’re corporeal. I can’t exactly call them zombies when they’re so coherent) is calling someone out on their goldfish like grieving period.
- Wait, Alaric knew just where to enter to find Damon. Kol couldn’t just do that to find Elena? Or was Alaric just going to his hidden bottle of Scotch and happened upon Damon, then? Barring further explanation, I’ll have to fanwank it that way which is both funny and sad.
- Eh, the football team hasn’t played since Tanner bit it in episode three, so it’s not like Matt needs that arm. Come to think of it Kol, didn’t you break that exact same arm back in Season Three? You’re kind of a douche when it comes to Matt’s throwing arm, aren’t you? And he doesn’t have health insurance. That officially means we have: Vampire Diaries Trope # X: Kol enjoys going out of his way to break Matt’s throwing arm.
- Wait, why does the basement under the school look all the other cave systems and tombs in town anyway? I think the Founding Families secretly wanted to be demon hunters so they went out of their way to make it happen.
- I don’t know…the veil drops and we get two recovered ghosts. The big Silas reveal so far is that Bonnie can’t see through him after all….let’s hope that the second half of the episode picks up on the epicness because Season Four may be pwning Season Three but this penultimate episode is no “The Sun Also Rises.” For that matter, “Before Sunset” is absolutely kicking its ass.
—————————————————————————————————————————–
Everything up until the fourth commercial break.
- “‘Brother and Friend.’ What genius came up with that one” Elena on seeing Jeremy’s tombstone. OMG, I totally called it. That’s kind of sort of what I alluded to in the “Pictures Of You” cold open.
- It would be funny if Jeremy just popped up out of no where and staked Kol all over again.
—————————————————————————————————————————–
Everything up until the fifth commercial break.
- Wait, so were none of the Alarics real? In real life it’s 4 am and I’m confused more than I would be.
- It’s a shame they (understandably) don’t get along because Damon and Bonnie can really make the best teammates.
- Dramatic entrance Jeremy. Maybe if you didn’t have to send Stefan out of the triangulation to pick up your crossbow for you you could have made it before the very last second. Also, good to see you. Your death hit me hard.
—————————————————————————————————————————–
Everything before the end.
- Outside of the hostage crisis that one time I don’t think I’ve ever seen the Mystic Grill open for business with this few customers in it before.
- Lexi appears three times in one year, not too shabby. And this is only our third time getting her in the actual present tense.
- You would think the Hunters would show up in front of the vampires that actually killed them.
- I think that would be pretty funny, depending on the concurrent timelines, if Klaus was facing down Marcel in a crowded nightclub or just finding out he was going to be a dad in that quiet crypt or whatever when all of a sudden, mystically, medieval Alexander appeared and tried to murder him with a broadsword.
- The Rebekah cliffhanger…not a good one. Well, the ‘how will she get out of this’ kind of is, but the ‘will she make it,’ doesn’t really work for me. I’m pretty freaking sure she will.
- Wait, Bonnie can’t be dead…she has no Bonnie to bring her back from it! FFS, she’s the best (undeveloped) character on this show.
—————————————————————————————————————————–
Some Final Thoughts
- Alaric gives Damon the Cure. Which…should excite me more than it does. I honestly don’t even remember who had it last, or how a heretofore ghost acquired it. Wait, Silas did. Anyway, I’m still rooting for Damon to turn human, mostly out of rote. But I’m kind of bored in advance by the whole “will he give it to Elena” moment of truth that’s sure to come next week, when 1) they’ve been flogging that dead horse way too much this season, 2) there’s no need for immediate action since they literally have forever to decide whether he will, and yet the show is acting like there’s some expiration date on his decision, and 3) Elena doesn’t seem all that interested in turning anyway. Honestly, what I’m more interested in this moment is Alaric’s motivation here. He was like a surrogate father to Elena, and it’s more important to him to let an occasionally sociopathic friend have a chance at moral growth than it is to directly give the cure to Elena and let his pseudo daughter have a once-in-an-eternity miracle cure and regain her humanity? Particularly since it was (sort of kind of in a way) partly Alaric’s fault that Elena got turned into a vampire to begin with? Dick move, Alaric. Bros before hos unto eternity, I guess.
- I don’t know what Kayla Ewell is doing and I’m going to pretend that real life isn’t a thing that affects character appearances. So anyway, why didn’t Vicki come back? If anyone had unfinished business, (and everyone who came back did, I’m not denying), I would put the unstable teenage girl whose three murderers are still on the loose (Damon killed her as a human, Stefan killed her as a vampire, and Matt killed her (or at least sent her back to the beyond) as a ghost), at the front of the line. Not to mention the fact that one of her biggest wishes in life was for the people in town to give a damn about her and everyone in town (sans Jeremy and Matt, and I’m on the fence about Matt), stopped giving a damn approximately one morning after her murder. And then, she loved Jeremy very much so I’d think she also would like a shot at taking out his murderer (heck, I can think of so many dead people who would have liked a shot at taking out Katherine. The Katherine/Elena pairing was so needless right now). So, yeah, I’d think she’d be at the front of the line of unfinished business before the other six returnees.
- I have to admit, and it could be the fatigue, but the two big fight scenes felt a bit tired. As in, they felt like retreads of scenes that were much better done in the past. Elena on Katherine, of course, was just like Stefan/Damon on Katherine in “Masquerade” (one of the best episodes in the series, IMHO). Except there, the audience didn’t understand what “linking” was so no one quite knew what the hell was going on, so the peril to Elena felt a bit more real and the suspense was much richer. The dialogue in “Masquerade” took its time, because it was more cat-and-mouse (and all three awesomely believed that they were the cat) whereas here, we’re just supposed to think that Elena’s just some emotionally damaged girl whose justified success would break her forever or something (and so the little bit of dialogue we got was some nagging from the Salvatores before the fact). And in “Masquerade,” they were all in formal wear so they just looked so much hotter[/shallow]. Here, it was all shadowy in a cave and they were dressed down so these weren’t exactly iconic images to live in our memories. eh. And of course, Kol was always enjoyably sadistic before. But this was pretty underwhelming…somehow even more predictable than anyone wondering if Elena might successfully murder the fanfavorite Katherine and the go-to witch ex machina in one blow. So.
- I don’t know. I’m coming off harsh when I did like the episode. I guess I just wish that, since they had to have the fight scenes, they could have done something to make them a bit less predictable. Like maybe shake up the dynamics a little bit (we haven’t seen April or Meredith in a million years…maybe they could have joined in and turned evil or badass for good or died or something and that would have differentiated the fights from earlier fights. I mean, it might not have been part of the master plan but the characters seem to have been dropped anyway). Or combine the two fights. Like, Bonnie could drop the link thing because that was unnecessary, and instead Elena could be winning the fight with Katherine. But then Kol could show up and be kicking Elena’s ass. But then Katherine could want to kill Kol to finally hurt Klaus who’s been hunting her and Elijah who has scorned her. But she wouldn’t be able to hurt Kol because he was her only chance at keeping Elena from hurting her. And Kol could want to hurt Katherine out of loyalty to Klaus, but if he hurt Katherine he wouldn’t get to focus on killing Elena. And so the only way for each character to get what they wanted would be to get the other thing they didn’t want. Elena could save herself from Kol by letting Katherine kill him, but then she wouldn’t get to kill Katherine. Kol could kill Katherine or Elena, but not both. Katherine could let Elena be distracted by Kol and kill her then, or kill him then for that matter, or she could just run away because she’s all about self-preservation, but also be torn because she wants the true immortality from Bonnie but if she stayed in the meanwhile she could end up dying. And in the middle of this melee Jeremy could show up, and it would be a million times more dramatic because no one would know what the hell was going on. And no one would even have to die for this fight to end up living on as one of the most memorably awesome non-cheats….And Alaric could crackwise exposition to a dead serious, over emotional Stefan on the phone so we’d get the motivations without wondering why no one was joining in and it just would have been great. I don’t know. I really like Season Four. I just would have liked it so much better if I had never seen the first two seasons, because so much of it just seems like a pale echo of similar scenes, instead of a new season in its own right, sometimes.
- And one very last note on the fights before I go on, since Elena was in both of them. Elena simply could not win the fight with Katherine, I absolutely understand why that was. But why on Earth couldn’t they let her win the fight with Kol? I know, I know, they wanted to make Jeremy’s entrance that much more dramatic, but I’m pretty sure everyone in the audience was just waiting for him to return anyway. Anyway, it’s not that I’m against Elena being rescued, per se, I’m just against vampire Elena always being rescued. Jeremy already earned his bona fides against Kol back in the day. What was the point of Elena training this episode, training all of Season Three, growing up a little bit by having the switch turned off (and therefore having new perspective as the predator, the fallibility of compassion, etc.) whatever, if she’s never going to win a fight? (I know, she beat Connor Jordan. That (if I remember right) was a spontaneous neck snap, I want to see her win a fight). She’s not a human girl anymore. It’s time for the writers to showcase that. I’m really not interested in fake empowerment, especially when one of the moral voices of the show (Stefan) keeps saying that her winning fights would just destroy her emotionally. Okay, he didn’t exactly say that. But since the writers never allow her to kill anyone anyway, not even to save her own life, not ever ever, that might as well be the implication.
- Wait, I lied about the one more thing regarding fights… One more daydream about the fight. I wish Lexi had popped up then and had it out with Katherine because that would have been epic. They’re (sans Elena) the two most pivotal women of Stefan’s existence, both love him and both hate and resent the other. And this mutual smackdown, unlike Katherine/Elena, could only ever ever happen during this very very brief window of opportunity when one particular witch during three specific massacres while holding one specific rock in the whole world said one specific spell, but no other time ever. (I suppose Katherine/Sage could also have occurred, being the two most pivotal women in Damon’s life, except both of those women are utterly indifferent to Damon so there would have been much less impact).
- Anyway, love the Bonnie twist, love that Grams is no longer being tortured (confused that the witches let her out but maybe the fallen veil loosened their stranglehold) and I’m glad that this storyline is finally getting at least as much attention as Rebekah’s low self-esteem or Elena’s emotional updates (get a twitter account, girl).
- The Rebekah/Matt/Caroline storyline went well. I don’t know what people are calling the coupling (“Ratt” and “Mehbekah” both sound pretty insulting) but I find them much better together than any other combo involving those two. And plus Rebekah saved Caroline from self-mutilation, which was surprisingly sweet. I still have hopes she’s switching over to Klaus’s show next year, but from time to time I’m beginning to like her okay.
- I get why Stefan was so wistful to see Lexi, beyond her being his best friend. The only time he’s actually seen her since her death he was in a coked up, switch-turned-off dick personality and she was forced to torture him for his own good before poofing out of his presence yet again before any goodbyes could be got through. As for their conversation…teasing him about befriending Caroline as his new pseudo-AA sponsor, but not asking about his staying friends with Damon a mere day after his murdering her (Lexi) seemed a bit incongruous, but I assume Lexi wanted to make it not all about her because she’s a much cooler person than just about everyone else.
Conclusion: Okay, this would be a better episode if I didn’t expect more from a penultimate VD episode. Particularly since “She’s Come Undone” was pretty damn good. And the predictable fight scenes weakened it bunches. On the other hand, Alaric! Jeremy! I was pretty sure you guys would show up but I missed you so much anyway. Jenna would have made it a perfect ten. Plus, at least three pretty good cliffhangers. So, a plus and a minus equal a neutral. I give “The Walking Dead” ten undead cameos out of twenty. And just one more episode to go!